W. Somerset Maugham Want Quotations

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.

Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

In the conduct of life we make use of deliberation to justify ourselves in doing what we want to do.

Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part.

He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.